Thanks for letting me in on early access testing. idk if this is the right place for feedback, and I hate to be a complainer but the UI is dogwater so far. The tab can’t be moved, and the custom materials can’t be edited. Also painting water doesn’t work properly, and while I’m at it, it’d be cool if we could make multiple variants of the water material aswell.
For now, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
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What about the UI is bad? I quite like it - besides the broken tab, which is known and will be fixed. Also, you can edit materials, by opening the Terrain Material Manager, shown in the dropdown box in the Terrain button under Home
Or alternatively, if you right click on the top part/bar of a tab where the name of the tab is and look down in the list, you’ll find a button for the Terrain Material Manager to open it.
I believe it turns out my Roblox client just wasn’t updated. Before updating, it showed “zcontrol” but no terrain, and then after rejoining showed “Production” so not sure really. After that I updated Roblox to the proper version but the place just wont load now, says waiting for an available server nonstop no matter what I do. If I can get it working though I will edit this message.
edit: The place finally loaded, on the correct version of Roblox now (0.733.385.7330050(01bf8d) in channel zterrainearlyaccess, but there’s still no terrain and the server channel still shows production.
You need to open 3 separate (and broken) windows before you can recolor a terrain material, and as you pointed out there’s a separate terrain material manager window for making an editing terrain materials (which btw the custom ones made via the other UI don’t show up on. Big oversight). That’s pretty unintuitive - it would be less confusing if they were consolidated into the same window as the terrain editor, f.e. next to the Create and Edit tab.
I think the UI for terrain editing is long overdue for an overhaul from the ground up anyway.
Aside from that, I think we should also have the option to edit the special features in custom variants of grass, like grass lenght. So that we can have f.e. both short green grass and tall dry grass/wheat. Would also be nice to be able to make custom blades of grass, for f.e. flowers and other foliage.
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I enabled the Early Access program!
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Hey Mox, if you are still seeing this issue, I would like to look into this more,. Could you pm me the place details and maybe give me permission to access the place?
Does this have a time line for release where we can publish? We are working on a game that we feel we could value from with this but can’t use this right now due to state not able to publish. Thanks
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Incredible stuff.
My upcoming game lags a fair amount IN STUDIO on WINDOWS devices, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s due to the terrain. Joining this early beta version of the improved terrain system has fixed the stutters and hitches massively. I can fly around the studio place freely now.
Terrain has always been fine on my mac devices, but I’ve only got even better things to say about it now with even this beta state version of the update on the way
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Are applications for this still being accepted?
Hey, this feature is an awesome step in the right direction for terrain on Roblox.
Being able to vary the materials and colors on different terrain geometry adds a lot of depth and detail and is overall a great fidelity upgrade to the feature.
My biggest piece of feedback on this feature is that having to navigate three windows, those being the Material Manager, Terrain Editor, and Terrain material Manager to use it properly is a little tedious. When creating many variants for differences in colors or material, hopping through all the different menus really slows down my workflow, and I think it would be better if the terrain material manager was either merged into the terrain editor or regular material manager.
Beyond the current feature set at focus here, I’d like to see some work done on the geometry of terrain itself.
Some materials, like rock and wood planks, have really unique shapes when drawn with terrain, and with this new change of being able to put any material on any other as a variant, we can finally see what other materials would look like on those terrain shapes. Although this is already possible with material variants, I think it would be nice if we can have some sort of a separation between the shape of terrain and its texture. For example, being able to designate a region of terrain to generate in the block shape of wooden planks while painting it various other terrain materials.
Another thing worth comment, is terrain’s low geometric fidelity. The fidelity of terrain being dependent on 4-stud large voxels makes it appear too low quality for higher fidelity builds and I’d love to see increased granularity at which terrain may be sculpted and manipulated especially when that terrain does not need to be modified or deform at runtime.
Thank you for your great work on these new features!
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will we also be getting occlusion culling for water?